Node 9.0.0: Chang in a Box

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is July 8th, 2024. I apologize for the recent AMA; I had really bad internet up at the ranch, but we got that fixed, and now I'm here. I want to share something with everybody. This is hot off the press as of two hours ago.

Here we go: it is a momentous occasion. Cardano Node 9.0.0 is a major release that contains all the changes needed for the Conway Ledger era, including on-chain governance via SIP 1694, support for Plutus V1 reference scripts, Plutus script signature support via SIP 69, and, of course, Plutus version 3.0.

This is the first node that can support crossing the 9.0 hard fork boundary on the mainnet and long-running testnets such as PrePro. It only supports entering the bootstrap phase of SIP 1694 in production environments, not the transition to enable D voting for all governance protocol version 10.0. There are also all the specifications and approval change logs for the things Leviathan has worked on.

What that translates to in non-technical speak is that we are fork-ready for the age of Voltaire. Here’s how it happens: moving forward, that’s tagged, cut, and released. The SPOs are going to independently test this, and they will make decisions on a case-by-case basis regarding when and how to upgrade and what level of testing is required for their comfort. Once we hit the threshold of 70% or greater SPOs, a hard fork date will be set, and we will hard fork into Chang. The ICC members who are elected will provide credentials, and the Genesis Keys will be burned.

We are now in the age of Chang. There are three steps from that hard fork in order for us to fully turn on the age of Voltaire. The first major step will be turning on the D voting system. The idea is that protocol version 10, or in version 9, will be turned on when we have 90 days elapsed from the time of the hard fork. All the D representatives who registered during that 90-day burn-in period will then actually have full voting power.

You have the interim Constitution, which has already been published and released, with guardrails. You have the interim constitutional committee and the D representatives; that’s the first major milestone. The second major milestone is something that happens simultaneously and ongoing: the community coming together and building out the precedents for how the government makes decisions, including the ratification of roadmaps and the annual budget process. Currently, there are working groups made up of community members. Next week, the people elected to the interim constitutional committee are coming here to Colorado, and they’re going to begin that conversation about how they, as members of the Cardano government, are going to integrate into the budget, product, and all the other precedents that are going to be set for how everyone is going to work at the constitutional committee level.

As the D representatives come online, they will also, as a co-equal branch of government, talk to the constitutional committee members and the SPOs, as part of the tripartite government, and make decisions about how quickly things are going to be done. The soonest we can discuss and actually ratify a budget will be after the D representatives are turned on. If it’s 90 days from when the hard fork happens, it’s likely no sooner than October. My recommendation is for an annual process to take effect in January, but it’s obviously going to be up to the government of Cardano. The third and final phase of turning on the government of Cardano is the Constitutional Convention.

We have an interim Constitution; it’s very bare bones and just covers SIP 1694 and some guardrails to initiate network stability. What will occur is a proto-constitution being written. It will be publicly unveiled and released into working groups. There are over 50 working groups scattered throughout the entire world on all six continents. They will take this, and the people in those working groups will make decisions about what they like, what they don’t like, what they want to include, and what they want to take out.

They will mark it up and elect delegates and alternates. The delegates and alternates will then be allowed to travel, free of charge, to Argentina at the end of the year for a constitutional convention. They’re going to take all their markups, and the Constitutional Convention will come together. They’ll take the proto-constitution and translate it into a draft constitution. Once it’s been voted on and approved by the delegates, it will then go to be ratified on-chain by the on-chain government.

Once it’s been ratified on-chain, there will be a transition, and the entire interim constitutional committee will have to stand for a new election under the new rules of the new constitution. At that juncture, IO will no longer have any governance role at the on-chain government level. We will not serve as a delegate, and we will not serve as a constitutional committee member after that’s all done. We will still, of course, be core developers. We’ll still be writing code and papers at the discretion of the on-chain government for the roadmap and budget process, and our level of involvement will be completely decided by what the community wants to do, as it should be.

The same is true for the other entities, Emurgo and the CF. They have to make decisions about whether they want to run for reelection because right now they’re interim constitutional committee members transitioning all the institutional knowledge to the elected group. They’re going to have to decide whether they want to run for reelection. We have decided not to after the transition is over, and of course, they’re going to have to make that decision. So, things are rolling; it’s moving very fast.

People are working really hard, and this is a major milestone. This release took two years from the initial plans to where we are today—thousands and thousands of hours of meetings, conversations, and hard work from so many people all around the entire ecosystem. SIP 1694 alone had more than 25 workshops all across the world where thousands of people in the Cardano community came and contributed to it. It’s important to point out that this is the basis of what we call minimum viable governance. That’s the basis of it—meaning it’s not perfect, it’s not permanent.

The intent is to give a voice to everyone so everyone can have a discussion about how we can make an even better voice. The first touchpoint there is version one of the Constitution, the final Constitution. The second touchpoint is the precedents, procedures, and practices that we’re putting together. How often do we meet for budget? How often do we meet for roadmap considerations?

Which institutions are going to facilitate that? What circumstances are put behind this? Under what terms can that be revoked, and how would it be revoked? How does dispute resolution work? There are thousands of things to discuss.

The ICC is going to be in the weeds of it; they’re going to be working real hard as they converge here. Remember, you voted for them, and they represent you. Ultimately, they work for you. We’ve already begun discussions with many different projects and said, “Hey, if you have a community, you need to become a D representative.” Whether you’re a decentralized exchange, an NFT project, or a meme coin, whatever it might be, if you’re on Cardano and you have a community, you owe it to your community to become a delegated representative.

In the next 180 days, we’re going to learn a lot about what that means—how to vote for them, how to work for them, how to look at their voting record, and basically form a practical on-chain government. There will be thousands of conversations, and nothing will ever be the same. It’s going to be better, and it’s going to be significantly smarter. Whatever grievances you’ve had with me and all the work I’ve done, whether you love it or hate it, that’s in the past now because Cardano Node 9.0 basically means Cardano has the best, the most decentralized, and I hope the most effective decentralized government in the entire cryptocurrency industry.

It’s the last mile, and it is the age of Voltaire. Now we have one final major milestone, and we’re going to do it all together because we have to do it together, which is the remnants of Boso. When you look through the entire roadmap—Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Voltaire—it’s very easy to say mission accomplished by any reasonable assertion. It’s been ten years of my life; it’s been a long, long road. We have accomplished an enormous amount on the theory side and an enormous amount on the coding side, but there are open questions about how far down the road we want to go with rollups, partner chains, Hydra, and L2 solutions.

As I speak, there’s an active prototyping effort for both L2 solutions and tiered pricing. The community has to build up the muscle of learning how to run a roadmap and understand it at a very deep level. It has to build a broad coalition of many different vendors from many different places and command-and-control structures that are deeply decentralized in order for us to have the most decentralized development team in the cryptocurrency space. So, what we’re going to do is we’re going to do Boso together. As we continue to prototype, you’re going to see Hydra 1.

0 likely before the end of the year and a beautiful roadmap for where we can take Hydra, thanks to all the new capabilities we’ve gained. There are already projects like ZK rollups and others that are working diligently to understand how to do rollups in Cardano. We have a great team with partner chains, which is being led by the Midnight partner chain, showcasing how to do that on the interoperability side. We’ve released the paper, and the prototype is under construction right now for L2 solutions. My goal is to make sure that out in public, through interactions, everybody gets to see the L2 solutions prototype to the extent that we can actually submit an RFP and get a fixed cost, fixed time contract.

The community can decide how quickly they want that, and this builds up the muscle of community control over the roadmap and the priorities. We did the heavy lifting of figuring out how to solve these very difficult problems and get them integrated into L2 solutions. None of our engineers are going anywhere; none of our scientists are going anywhere. Now, we’re in a position where we recommend to you what we think ought to be done, but ultimately your representatives, whom you voted for, are going to have to make the final call on where they want to go and where they think the best options are. It is entirely possible, and frankly prudent, that there’s going to be some deviation from what we think and what they think because that’s what decentralization is about, and it’s ultimately a good thing for us all.

It’s going to make sure that we don’t leave anybody behind, project or otherwise. This is why it’s so essential that if you are a user of Cardano and you have a DApp you really like, make sure you reach out to the leadership who built that and encourage them to become a D representative so they can represent the interests of your user experience and the things you care about in the broader governance of Cardano. Anybody can become a D representative, including the people listening. There are very minimal requirements, and overall, it allows us as an ecosystem to get a holistic understanding of who the users are, what matters to them, and where they think we should go as a whole. This is what makes us unstoppable because no matter how brilliant Vitalik is or the Ethereum core developers are, or your particular ecosystem or flavor of the week, no one is smarter than everyone, and no one team can see everything.

If we engage the entire community, it has always been my belief that governance is the key differentiating feature. The reality is, give us 12 or 24 months, and we will be the most scalable ecosystem; it’s an inevitability thanks to good protocol design decisions that we’ve made. Give us 12 to 24 months, and thanks to partner chains, we will bridge the gap and achieve universal interoperability with the chains that matter, ensuring that their traffic is our traffic and vice versa. We’re already seeing a big push for multichain, and I think we’re going to be very competitive. Give us 12 or 24 months, and you will continue to see incredible new DApp projects and experiences, especially thanks to the fact that we now have a 1.

5 billion ADA treasury unlocked. That’s going to be a huge amount of growth, whether VCs want to acknowledge it or not, and I think it’s going to build a lot of bridges. But one thing that is so far beyond all of them is that we now have access, thanks to Chang, to the collective brilliance of all of you, and you have a say. That’s the big differentiator. If you hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana, you don’t have a say.

With Cardano, you do, and that forever is what’s going to make the biggest difference. So, on behalf of every single person at Input Output Global who has worked tirelessly for the last nine years, thank you so much for all of this. It really has been the privilege of a lifetime building this amazing thing. On behalf of all the engineers who work so hard, a personal thank you to them from me. This was not easy; we had to invent entirely new technology, we had to improve the programming languages we chose, from Agda to Haskell and everything in between.

We had to learn how to make things happen, how to make magic happen. It’s very rare that you get a chance to work on something like this at this level, and you get to be on the bleeding edge forever. You get to defy common notions and wisdom. Everybody told us to be successful; you had to move fast and break things. We took the opposite view—a decade-long view.

Everybody told us you can’t blend startups with peer-reviewed scientific research and expect to be competitive. Everybody told us that building a decentralized government with people you don’t know, you’ve never met, and you’ve never interacted with somehow can’t be as effective as a centralized one. But what we’ve done as an ecosystem is we’ve proven people wrong every single step of the way. We’ve not only survived but thrived—six-plus years of uptime, thousands of projects, billions of dollars. It’s really an amazing accomplishment, and frankly speaking, it’s just the beginning.

In the next 24 to 36 months, we’re going to show the world who we are and what we can do. So, allow me to be the first to welcome all of you to the age of Voltaire. It’s going to be an exciting, sometimes scary, but always eventful time. To all the SPOs, happy testing! I can’t wait to see what you guys find.

Thank you very much. Cheers!